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24 Interesting Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Canada…

The word ‘Canada’ itself comes from the word Kanata, which means ‘settlement’ or ‘village’ in the language of the indigenous St Lawrence Iroquoians (the name of the people who lived on the shores of the St Lawrence river, in what is modern Quebec and Ontario, between the 14th and 16th centuries).

Canada is in North America, it consists of ten provinces and three territories and extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean.

It boasts the largest coastline in the world.

The capital of Canada is Ottawa – not Vancouver or Toronto, as people often think.

Ottawa has a population density of only 820 people per square mile, compared with London, which has 13,870 people per square mile!

You thought Britain was cold? The average low for the month of January in Ottawa is -14.4 degrees Celsius (6.1 degrees Fahrenheit).

The 2 main languages spoken in Canada are English and French.

Canada is probably larger than you thought; it is the second largest country in the world – second to Russia!

To help you put that into perspective, Canada is larger than the whole of the European Union; it’s 15 times larger than France, 33 times larger than Italy, three times as large as India, five times larger than Mexico, more than 30 per cent larger than Australia and roughly the same size as 81,975 Walt Disney Worlds put together!

Despite its vastness, in 2012 Canada’s population was only around a mere 34.75 million, compared to the UK’s 63.7 million!

Over half of Canadians have degrees, making Canada the most educated country in the world.

30 per cent of the world’s boreal forest and 10 per cent of the world’s total forest cover is in Canada. An incredible 396.9 million hectares of forest and other wooded land can be found across this huge country.

If, for some reason, you find yourself walking the length of Canada’s coastline, be prepared because even if you never stopped (not even to eat, drink or sleep) it would take you four and a half years! We’d suggest you take some plasters for inevitable blisters!

Canada’s lowest recorded temperature was in 1947, in Snag, Yukon. It was an astonishing -63 degrees Celsius (-81.4 degrees Fahrenheit), which is roughly the same temperature as Mars!

Remarkably, Canada has over 3 million lakes. A large 9% of Canadian territory is fresh water and over 60% of all the lakes in the world are found within Canadian borders.

Residents of Churchill, Canada, leave their cars unlocked to offer an escape route for pedestrians who might encounter polar bears.

Licence plates in the Canadian Northwest Territories are shaped like polar bears.

Ice hockey is the most popular sport in Canada.

In Newfoundland, the Atlantic Ocean sometimes freezes so people play hockey on it, as you do.

You know the giant black, hairy breed of dog (similar in size to a Shetland pony), called Newfoundlands? They originate from Newfoundland, Canada.

Unsurprisingly, at a lengthy 1,178 miles (1,896 km) long, ‘Yonge Street’, which goes through Toronto and Ontario, is the longest street in the world.

It was discovered in the 1960s that parts of Canada has less gravity than the rest of the earth.

As an incentive, ‘positive tickets’ are given out by Police departments in Canada when they see someone doing something positive.